According to Abraham F. Lowenthal, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, California shouldn’t get too preoccupied with its current economic crisis, however pressing. “It is important to pay attention to the urgent, but it is equally vital to keep our eye on what’s going to be truly important in the 21st century,” Lowenthal said. “The ability of Californians to understand and respond intelligently to the current environment is going to be very important going forward.” Below, Lowenthal, author of Global California: Rising to the Cosmopolitan Challenge, explains why California is so connected to the world, how best it should capitalize on those connections, and whether the state needs something like a foreign policy.

Q. What got you interested in writing this book?

A. I’ve long been a specialist on international relations and foreign policy, and particularly U.S. relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. But I’ve also had a second career as someone who has established and run a series of different think tanks and forums for discussion of international policy issues. I set up two such organizations in Washington, DC – one in the late 1970s and one in the mid-1980s, both focused on Latin America.

Then I moved to California for personal reasons. After I had settled in Los Angeles, I eventually passed the leadership of one of these Washington think tanks to my successor there. I got involved in building a new think tank and public policy forum, the Pacific Council on International Policy. This was an attempt to create for the West Coast something equivalent to the Council on Foreign Relations on the East Coast, but different because of the time – the turn of the 21st century – and the place, Los Angeles and the West Coast. I got involved working with others in building the Pacific Council as a West Coast forum for thinking about international issues and how they affect the West Coast, and how the West Coast relates to rest of world.

The more I got into it from the practical standpoint of establishing a think tank, the more I got to thinking, first off-and-on, then more systematically, about how international relations and foreign policy look different from the perspective of California, compared with Washington, DC. As I began thinking about that, I realized that international challenges and opportunities are extremely important to California. California, because it has the dimensions of a country, is also very important to the world. But there is no systematic thinking about the international relations of California or how to enhance California’s positive impact on international issues. There has been very little thinking about that, there’s no book written about it, no significant article. I began thinking: this is something that should be done. When I passed leadership of the Pacific Council to my successor in 2005, I began concentrating on a book that would look at California’s international interests, stakes and clout; at how Californians are affected by international challenges and opportunities; and at how Californians might identify and advance their interests internationally and have a constructive impact on international relations, and more broadly on U.S. relations with the rest of the world.

Q. You mention that national foreign policy makers think of California as “remote and exotic, if not irrelevant.” Why do they think of the state this way, and is this attitude changing at all?

A. Looking at it from the standpoint of the East Coast foreign policy establishment, traditionally the international relations of the U.S. have been managed from the government in Washington and the financial community in New York, and by a group of in-and-outers, people who come in take responsibility who have typically come from the law firms and financial firms of Boston, New York, and that whole corridor. They have had the responsibility for conducting the foreign policy of the United States. They have tried to think in terms of the national interest as being the lodestar, the guiding principle of foreign policy decisions. They have tended to think of people outside of that corridor having, at best, regional perspectives, but not really understanding the national interest.

That view, that people outside of the Atlantic coast corridor – especially those far removed like us in California and on the West Coast – more generally are irrelevant to international policy concerns has been historically reinforced by how we have looked at foreign policy from the West Coast perspective. I think for most of the time and for most people on the West Coast, foreign policy has been thought of as something which is taken care of by the federal government in Washington, from which we stay as far as we can. People with leadership qualifications in California – with honorable individual exceptions, of course – have thought they should pay attention to economic issues, environmental issues, lifestyle and so on, but they’re not into foreign policy. My view is that if we think about our lives in California, if we think about economics, if we think about education, about culture, about health, about so many aspects of our lives we realize that international trends, challenges and opportunities drive much of our daily lives in California. So it is absolutely anachronistic to think that managing international relations is not our concern. I think the flaw has been the concept that there is a national interest in which Californians don’t participate. The national interest is not engraved in tablets of stone handed down from a mountaintop to an all-knowing lawgiver who is uniquely able to decipher the script. The national interest should be the result of an open political process, in which the interests of different groups from different regions and sectors and ethnic backgrounds are all mediated through the political process. But we in California have not been very active participants in that. Even though we are the largest state by share of exports and imports, the largest attraction for international tourism, the source of so much innovative technology through Silicon Valley and the biogenetics industry, and so much international cultural influence through Hollywood and through the great universities of California.

Q. You note in your book that in recent years, California has backed away from its international outlook. Why is this?

A. I do point out that beginning in about the 1980s, there was increasing emphasis in different sectors on the importance of international relations. International studies programs began to be developed and strengthened, research centers were established, corporations devoted more attention to international affairs and the media – particularly the print media – gave a lot more attention to the international dimension starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

So you take for example the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The San Diego Union-Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News – all devoted more column inches and more personnel to international issues from the late 1980s and early 1990s to the end of the decade. And at the state government level, there was beginning in the 1980s an impressive expansion of international offices. California set up a number of international trade offices around the world, and actually had the largest number of such offices with the largest investment in that kind of work of any state in the U.S. as of the early 1990s. What happened is the economic downturn of the mid-1990s put a lot of those developments into question. There is a tendency in government and in the corporate world that when there is an economic downturn, the most recently hired are the first to be let go, and the most recently opened offices are the first to be closed because you can imagine living without them. That’s what happened to the state trade offices, starting with the first downturn and then greatly accelerated by the current economic difficulties. One after the other of newspapers has reduced their international coverage, the number of reporters and column inches.

So it’s ironic that though the objective circumstances show that the international dimensions are ever more important to the future of California in terms of trade, public health, education, and so many aspects of society, the amount of concerted attention that we are paying to those issues has been declining. It’s a paradox and it’s weakening our ability in California to be prepared to be effective and competitive in the 21st century.

Q. Can you elaborate on the impact of the current economic crisis on California’s international outlook?

A. I don’t think there is an across the board answer to that. A number of companies are looking harder at expanding their international markets and looking for international investment, particularly involving China because that’s where the money is. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks in the 1930s he said “because that’s where the money is.” That’s an important principle in the business world.
In terms of the public sector, the state government and the state legislature have been grappling, as you know very well, with a very intense budget crisis. They have their eyes on the next quarter and paying the bills and figuring out how to balance revenues and expenditures. It’s a highly critical and urgent atmosphere. My point is, although obviously they need to concentrate on this immediate crisis, we ought to be thinking our way into the future and being sure we’re strategic as we come out of this intense economic crisis. We ought to be thinking about what it will take for California to be competitive over the next few years. And in that sense it’s very important to manage our international relationships more effectively and in particular to be much more knowledgeable in dealing with the most dynamic economies of Asia and also much more effective in managing our relationships with our nearest and important neighbor, Mexico, which affects so many aspects of life in California.

Q. How best should California pursue this international strategy?

A. There are three broad areas. And it’s important to emphasize the premise of everything I’m saying – much as I think it’s important for Californians to think about our international interests and to identify and promote them effectively, we can’t have an independent state foreign policy that is contradictory to U.S. foreign policy. The Constitution as interpreted by the courts does not permit that….

There are things we can do. First of all, we can be much more strategic and effective about having an infrastructure on national foreign policy that is consistent with our interests and perspective. If you take the examples of China and Mexico, I think it is evident that there are attitudes, perspectives, and interests in California that have not been sufficiently promoted in the national foreign policy arena because we just haven’t been an important actor. We have something to contribute to that process. The most important way of doing so is through our large congressional delegation. It’s the largest in Washington and has the capability to have a decisive influence on the legislature and on the executive branch. Of course, it doesn’t often operate as a delegation. It’s divided on party and regional lines. But my argument is that these international issues that broadly affect the citizens of the state should be looked at by our congressional delegation, perhaps in dialogue with the governor and the Speaker of the Assembly. California’s congressional delegates should try to work together to identify and advance the international interests of the state. I call for a process that would help make this happen.

The second of these broad areas for action has to do with those subjects on which there is considerable scope for state action – strengthening infrastructure, like the ports and transportation facilities, broadband capability, and a number of other aspects to make us competitive and efficient in terms of energy and environmental policy. In fact, the one area that California is doing at least some of what I’m calling for has to do with environmental policy, where California is a national and international leader, and where the governor has been an international player, making agreements with the governments of Germany, the U.K., and others. That is an example of what could be done.

The third broad way to strengthen the ability of Californians to advance their international interests has to do with what I call building cosmopolitan capacity, that is, building the ability of citizens, firms, labor unions, nongovernmental organizations, and state and local governments to understand the rapidly changing world in which we live, to have much more effective international studies programs and much more investment in the international education of our students. [They] will operate in an international environment to do research, as I’ve done in the book for an extended section on the California-Mexico connection. That’s an example of the kind of research that should be done by others, on California’s relations with China, India, Korea, Canada, Germany, and so forth.

*Photo of Mr. Lowenthal courtesy USC, photo of Global California courtesy Stanford University Press.